The cellist, who self-releases her music rather than work with a label, has made a habit of sharing details of how her earnings break down between different sources, for the benefit of her peers and the wider debate around digital music payouts.
Over the weekend, Keating published her latest set of figures as a public document on Google Drive, splitting her recorded-music earnings from 2013 into sales and streams. In short, 92% of her income last year came from sales – $75,341 – with a further $6,380 coming from streaming services.
Keating’s biggest source of income last year was Apple’s iTunes Store, where sales of 32,170 single tracks and 3,862 albums netted her just over $38,195.
Meanwhile, 185 tracks and 2,899 albums sold through her profile on direct-to-fan site Bandcamp earned a further $25,575, while a mixture of physical and MP3 sales on Amazon earned her a further $11,571.
403,035 Spotify streams earned Keating $1,764, while more than 1.9m views of videos on YouTube – mostly those uploaded by other people featuring her music – earned her $1,248. US personal radio service Pandora generated $3,258 of royalties – but from an undisclosed number of streams.
Keating also notched up 266,331 streams on SoundCloud and 222,226 streams on her Bandcamp site, neither of which generated royalties for her.
She tweeted a link out to the spreadsheet on Friday (21 February) without passing comment on any of the services listed. “2013 music sales & streaming numbers for a middle-aged mom in a non-album cycle,” she tweeted, while noting that Apple keeps 30% of iTunes sales, while Bandcamp takes a 10% cut of sales through its website.
Keating’s per-stream payout for Spotify was thus $0.0044 in 2013. The streaming service said in December 2013 that its average per-stream payout to music rightsholders is between $0.006 and $0.0084 – a figure that includes payouts to publishers as well as labels (or in Keating’s case, self-releasing artists).
Her Spotify payouts were still a long way ahead of YouTube’s $0.00064 per stream: a single Spotify stream was worth nearly seven YouTube streams in 2013. However, it would take 160 Spotify streams to generate the same income for Keating as a single track sale on iTunes.
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2 ... be-payouts
